A Holy Hole in Your Head?
Ever suspected that religious people have a part of their brain missing? Well, here’s a new study that will let you take a cheap (and reasonably accurate) shot at the God-fearing…
While the popular notion of a search for the “God spot” is a bit silly — particular “spots” don’t really control the entirety of our various behaviors or beliefs — the idea that there’s a physical, biological, even neuroanatomical and genetic basis for religious belief seems increasingly likely. Religious thinking has been tied to various brain regions before, but a new study (abstract) moves things a big step forward. By measuring indicators of religiosity in brain-cancer patients before and after surgery to remove their tumors, a team of researchers in Italy has found that damage to a specific region of the brain (the posterior parietal cortex) can increase a person’s feelings of “self-transcendence,” or the feeling of being connected to others and to the universe.
The parietal cortex has previously been linked to maintaining one’s sense of self — such as in keeping track of the locations of one’s various body parts.
The researchers surveyed 88 brain-cancer patients before and after surgery, as reported by Discover’s 80 Beats blog, asking them to answer “yes” or “no” to statements such as: “I often feel so connected to the people around me that I feel like there is no separation”; “I feel so connected to nature that everything feels like one single organism;” and “I got lost in the moment and detached from time.” People who answered “yes” to these statements score high on the trait of self-transcendence. The same people who score high on this measure are also prone to belief in things like miracles and ESP.
What the researchers found was that people who came in with tumors in the posterior parietal cortex scored higher on self transcendence before surgery than other patients, who came in with tumors in the frontal cortex. After the tumor removal, the patients who’d had tumors in the posterior parietal cortex scored even higher on self-transcendence. Patients who’d had tumors in the frontal cortex showed no change on that trait after the surgery.
What this would appear to show is that feelings of self-transcendence, and thus possibly religiosity, can be changed by alterations to neuroanatomy — in this case, first from a tumor, and then from the inevitable damage incurred by removal of a tumor.
Of course, this study, as with all studies, has its weaknesses. First off, the changes in self-transcendence were only measured three to seven days after surgery. It would be interesting to see how long these changes last — if they are, perhaps, permanent. Also, as one cognitive neuroscientist put it to Nature News, the whole study is based on “one self-report measure, which is a coarse measure that includes some strange items.”
Indeed, it would be interesting to see a study like this with a much more detailed questionnaire on various aspects of religiosity and with much more long-term follow-up after surgery.
Still, this is possibly the clearest link ever made between brain anatomy and belief in the supernatural. Perhaps surgery to cure believers (or non-believers!) is only decades and decades away.
Neuroworld looked at the compatibility of libertarianism and atheism here
Neuroworld checked in on the hunt for the God spot way back in November here.